A Liberal Dose, Sept. 23, 2021 "Labor History in White County, Part 4"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 23, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 4”

(see Part 1 HERE, Part 2 HERE, and Part 3 HERE)

 

This week I am going to conclude my series on labor history and coal mines, but will go outside the county line. I am speaking of the 1932 strike at the Wilder and Davidson mines, which employed about 600 men. The mines were located in the region where Fentress, Overton, Cumberland, and Putnam Counties come together. The Wilder and Davidson mines (and company towns) were in Fentress County, and a couple of smaller mines were across the county line in Overton. The Wilder mine, operated by the Fentress Coal and Coke Company, was named for the company’s founder, whom we mentioned in Part 1 of this series: Union general John Wilder, who was opening up mining operations in the Upper Cumberland at roughly the same time as White County’s Confederate general George Dibrell.

Like the miners in Bon Air, the Wilder-Davidson miners had formed their own local union and gone on strike in 1919 and 1924. As in White County, the miners came out of the 1924 strike worse than they had gone in. In 1931 they joined the national United Mine Workers of America and their local, 4467, negotiated a one-year contract with the owners on July 8, 1931. When it expired, the owners refused to extend it and instead cut wages for the third time, and on July 9, 1932 the miners went on strike. With the exception of one Danish immigrant, all the miners were Upper Cumberland natives, including their leader Barney Graham.

In essence, the situation got much worse than it had in White County but not as bad as in West Virginia -but, still, plenty bad enough. Workers were evicted from company housing, and new (non-union) workers were hired to take their place. Strikers, scabs, and company security clashed repeatedly over the following year. As the Tennessean put it on May 7, 1933, there were “barn-burnings, dynamitings, shootings from ambush, fights, and neighborhood coolnesses.” The national guard was called in. Relief organizations from around the country sent food, medicine, and clothing to the miners.

On April 30, 1933, Barney Graham came into the company town of Wilder to pick up medicine for his sick wife. While he was walking down the street two company guards, Shorty Green and Doc Thompson, approached him from behind and opened fire on him. Graham was shot in the back ten times, and the back of his skull was crushed by rifle butts. Doctors determined that the head injuries alone would have killed him. The killing was ruled self-defense. The murder took the wind out of the miners and their determination to continue the strike, and it soon ended- but there were unforeseen consequences.

One was that Graham became a national labor hero. His daughter wrote a song about him, “The Ballad of Barney Graham,” which was later recorded by Pete Seeger. “Although he left the union he worked so hard to build,” the song concludes, “his blood was spilled for justice, and justice guides us still.”

The other consequence was the effect Graham’s death had on his good friend Myles Horton. “If I wasn’t a radical before that,” Horton later said, “I became one then.” In 1932, Horton had established Highlander Folk School in Monteagle. He was one of the people who came to the mines bringing relief supplies, and reported on events throughout the strike. After Graham’s death, Horton redoubled his efforts to make his school a place to train union workers in nonviolent organizing. In 1955, MLK and Rosa Parks -amid efforts to start a bus boycott in Montgomery -attended Horton’s classes, and Horton became an active participant in the civil rights movement.

I’ve told you these stories to show what a long history union organizing has had here, and the struggles workers have gone through. It should never be forgotten. In my opinion, in the Upper Cumberland we should start calling Labor Day Barney Graham Day.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 16, 2021 "Labor History in White County, Part 3"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 16, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 3”

(see Part 1 HERE and Part 2 HERE)

 

Let’s resume our discussion of organized labor and coal mines, which we will conclude next week.

Although booming at the turn of the century, within a decade the Bon Air Coal and Iron Company was in decline due to a significant decrease in profitability. This was, in large part, the result of a bad decision -the company invested heavily to construct two very expensive coke ovens, only to realize the coal in the area was not of high enough quality for the coke process. The company went into receivership and, in 1917, was bought by Nashville businessman William Cummins and several northern investors, including the owner of the New York Yankees and the owner of the Chicago Cubs (and chewing gum tycoon) William Wrigley. A rival coal company started in Clifty was also bought by the group, and consolidated with the Bon Air operations.

With WWI over, in 1919 UMWA president John L. Lewis directed a new campaign to unionize in the South. There were work stoppages on Bon Air in 1919 and 1922. During that same time, the famous West Virginia Coal Wars were reaching a crescendo. There was a shoot-out on the streets of Matewan in 1920 (see the movie Matewan), and in 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain played out over several days -over 10,000 WV miners, police, and strikebreakers in a pitched battle that saw over 100 men killed. Fortunately, things did not reach that point in Middle and East Tennessee.

Bon Air miners also participated in a national UMWA strike beginning in late March, 1924, with over 1,000 miners walking off the job in White County in protest of their wages being lowered to what they had been in 1917. In the middle of the strike, suspected moonshiner Ernest Price and several friends were reportedly drunk and waving guns around in Bon Air and DeRossett. They were confronted near DeRossett by A. M. Phillips (manager of the mine’s company store) and a federal revenue agent, Hugh Lowery. Price shot Lowery in the thigh, severing an artery which caused the lawman to bleed to death. Price then backed out of town, threatening to shoot anyone who got in his way, and headed up the mountain. William Cummins offered a $500 dollar reward for Price’s capture, and two thousand people joined in the chase -a large number of them striking miners. The strike, meanwhile, ended after ten weeks with the miners giving in. Around the same time, the price of coal went down significantly, and the company closed down several of the less productive mines -Carola in 1922, Clifty in 1924, and Eastland in 1926. The large mine at Ravenscroft continued production, and several smaller mines in Bon Air and Eastland were leased out to individuals. In 1926 the company merged with two out-of-town companies to reform as the Tennessee Products Corporation, with Wrigley as the Chairman of the Board.

Late 1929, of course, saw the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, and introduced even more dire financial straits for the company (and its workers). When the FDR administration guaranteed collective bargaining rights with the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, the miners at Ravenscroft once more began to organize. In 1934 the miners and owners were unable to reach an agreement, and a strike was called. The Ravenscroft mine was shut down, and a year later the railroad tracks connecting the mines to Sparta were pulled up. As the Sparta paper put it on May 13, 1937: “The once thriving industry of coal mining in this county belongs to the past.” This was not the end of the UMWA connection to White County, though. It was UMWA organizers who would establish the (brief) union at the Sparta Shirt factory in the 1940s.

(My thanks to the Bon Air Mountain Historical Society for the wealth of information they make available to the public.)

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 9, 2021 "Labor History in White County Part 2"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 9, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 2”

(see Part 1 HERE)

 

Last week, in honor of Labor Day, I started a series on labor history of White County, which is mostly going to focus on the coal mining industry. The Bon Air Coal Company was a booming business in the late 1800s, and for the first decade of its existence seems to have had no major labor disagreements. In the summer of 1898, though, Nashville newspapers were reporting that a strike was imminent at Bon Air or, by some accounts, already started. Company manager J. M. Overton, no doubt to reassure his customers, told a reporter from the Nashville American that his workers were the best paid in the state, and that things were going so well the company was about to add one hundred more workers (they already had five hundred) as soon as they finished building housing to accommodate them. They were shipping out forty train cars of coal per day, and expected to soon be shipping out sixty. When rumors persisted, and the people of Nashville stared getting nervous about having enough coal coming in, he spoke to the paper again and admitted that some of the miners had tried to form a union. Overton ascribed the organizing efforts to twenty men who had subsequently been fired, after which the remaining miners voted against having a union, after all. He said the remaining men were, “as a rule, well pleased with their treatment.”

If so, it did not last. By February, 1899, the American was receiving reports that over 400 of the men had walked off the job, and that only 25 or 30 had remained. Output shrank from forty cars per day to only three or four. The miners had two simple demands: they wanted their recent pay cut of 10% restored, and they wanted more reasonable prices at the company store. They were willing to settle for the reasonable prices. Apparently, some miners had already been fired and evicted from company housing, including a majority of leading voices in the proposed union. Company management denied that there was a strike, and said that the radical decline in production was because the miners were temporarily doing chores around the mine instead of extracting coal. Evidently a compromise was reached -most likely the requested lowering of company store prices -because by February 11 worried Nashville citizens were being assured by the American that the crisis had abated. On May 17, 1900, the Sparta paper reported that the Bon Air Coal Company had its highest payroll ever, and still struggled to meet the market demand. Soon more mines were being opened on the mountain and more tracks were being laid. Nonetheless, the 1899 incidents in White County were included in the topics for discussion at the United Mine Workers convention in Knoxville in 1901.

In 1908, after a consortium of Alabama mine owners cut workers’ wages by 17%, UMW initiated a massive strike throughout the south that included 18,000 coal miners. The strike -which failed after two months, weakening UMW in Alabama -did not, however, include Tennessee miners. Bon Air Coal and Iron Company president John P. Williams remarked to reporters that his workers were all content and satisfied, and it was further noted that “the mines in Tennessee are all conducted on the ‘open shop’ principle.”

There were dramatic coal strikes out west in the years just before WWI, the most famous being the Ludlow strike in Colorado in which national guard troops opened fire with machine guns on a tent city inhabited by striking miners and their families, killing over a hundred people. Strikes abated during U.S. involvement in WWI, in support of the war effort, but picked up in a big way once the war ended in November, 1918. This time Bon Air miners would be in the thick of it, and a coal strike would be the background for one of Sparta’s most famous murders.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 2, 2021 "Labor History in White County, Part 1"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 2, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 1”

 

Labor Day has become, for many of us, a vacation day… a go-to-the-lake day, a day to take advantage of sales. The reason it is a holiday, though, is to celebrate the Labor Movement in the U.S. I wrote a couple of columns earlier this year (April 29 and May 6) that looked at the origin of that movement, why it became a holiday, and why we celebrate it in September while almost every other country does so in May. This time, as my own celebration of Labor Day, I am going to talk about the Labor Movement in White County and the Upper Cumberland.

Early labor organizing in this region, like in the rest of Appalachia, tended to focus on coal miners. Now, the wonderful folks at the Bon Air Mountain Historical Society know a lot more about coal mining in White County than I do, and their museum is a treasure. Go check them out, and you can learn a lot. I can tell you some basics, though. For one thing, while there was a lot of coal mining in Northern Appalachia before the Civil War (Pennsylvania and Ohio, mostly), there was very little in Central and Southern Appalachia until well after that conflict. This is because there were few railroads in the area. In the antebellum period, most railway construction in the South was designed primarily to transport cotton to the coast where it could be loaded onto ships for export. Cotton doesn’t grow well in the mountains, hence no railroads; without trains, it was impractical to dig coal because, well, it’s darn heavy and hard to transport. After the Civil War, especially toward the end of Reconstruction (which officially ended in 1877), northern investors and southern businessmen started to form partnerships that led to railroads entering the region, with the opening of coal mines shortly following. For example, Sparta native and former Confederate General George Gibbs Dibrell became director and president of the Southwestern Railroad Company right after the war, and around the time that company was bought out by the Nashville and Chattanooga Company, Dibrell formed the Bon Air Coal, Land, and Lumber Company, which shipped its first coal in 1888. Over the next several years, the company imported around two dozen families from Scotland who had experience extracting coal. In later years there were also immigrants from Bohemia and other parts of Europe brought in. Meanwhile, former Union General John T. Wilder bought up large swathes of land in counties east of here and also opened up several mines.

There was unrest among Tennessee coal miners by the early 1890s. One of the biggest issues was the fact that the state of Tennessee was leasing out convicts to work in the mines, at a much lower cost than the wages of free miners, putting miners out of work. This led to violence in Anderson County, about an hour’s drive east of White County, as miners not only went on strike but burned prison stockades and mining company buildings, setting the convicts free (on the condition they leave the mines). In what became known as the Coal Creek War, miners engaged in skirmishes with the state militia, with many killed or wounded on both sides. The situation died down when the Tennessee government refrained from renewing their contracts with the mining companies- the miners had succeeded in getting their attention.

The Coal Creek War did not extend into the mines of White County, though. In 1899 the Bon Air company was able to brag it had never used anything but free labor, that their safety record was better than their competitors, and that there had never been a strike in its mines. That did not last, however. The first strike would take place that very year.

More to come.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE